The MP3 Players

Wow, Apple is looking for the lucky person who purchase the billionth song at its iTunes Music Store! Some luxury prizes are ready to be awarded to the lucky person! The billionth song buyer will be rewarded one 20″ iMac, 10 iPod 60GB (5 white, 5 black) and $10,000 worth of iTunes Music Card. Besides, Apple also awards one iPod Nano 4Gb and $100 worth of iTunes Music Card for every 100,000 songs starting at 950,100,000.

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Are you usually reading stories for your kids before they sleep? Now you can let Natasha Lee-Lewis reads them on your behalf ! She is the young actress of Storynory. Storynory provides some interesting stories like The Frog, Hansel and Gretel, The Three Little Pigs and so on in MP3 formats. The best thing is that all these stories are free of charge ( read copyright ). You may download them into your iPod, or any MP3 players and play for kids. Storynory promised to deliver at least one story a week. For those interested, you may subscribe their podcast feed.

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The Apple Special Event, San Francisco yesterday brought a lot of surprise (as expected)! As others speculated, Steve Jobs - together with president of Motorola’ mobile division, Ron Garriques - introduced the long waited iTunes phone, Motorola ROKR E1.

With iTunes installed on PC/Mac, you can simply drag and drop up to 100 songs or random autofill (auto-shuffle) into your Motorola ROKR E1 via USB. It will pause music when you have a call and resume play automatically once you hang up.

The sound of Motorola ROKR E1 is good as Paul Boutin said.

{ iTunes + Cingular }

Yahoo Japan launched a new online music service Monday. To compete with Apple’s iTunes Music Store in Japan, the latest service allows free streaming of any of 100,000 songs before buying them.

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Other Internet music services in Japan offer only 30 seconds from free sampling, making Yahoo’s the first to offer free listening to full-length songs, Yahoo Japan spokesman Masaki Hanyu said.

However the quality of free music is only comparable to FM radio. Higher quality of musics are only available for paid download. The free offering also generate advertising revenue to Yahoo Japan. Toyota Motor Corp. and Asahi Breweries Ltd. are lined up to advertise on video commercials preceding the free songs.

{ via BusinessWeek }

Wow, iTunes Music Store (iTMS) in Japan has just sold 1 million songs in just 4 days! This is the greatest startup in any of the 20 countries that iTunes Music Store made. The Japanese iTMS was just launched last thursday, 4th August 2005.

“We’ve had the No. 1 digital music player in Japan. And now we can say we have the No. 1 online music store in Japan,” said Eddy Cue, Apple Computer Inc. vice president of applications.

With just 4 days, iTMS is outperformed than Sony Corp’s online music store. It is around 450,000 songs downloaded per month through the Sony Corp’s online music store.

It’s time for Sony to make some changes! Will Sony join the iTMS?

{ CBS News via DAPreview }